The Taqwacores (24 page)

Now Umar, he was Muslim. But he didn’t look it.

 

 

Apart from the masjid and a brief excursion to the mall, I spent the whole Thanksgiving break in my parents’ house living out of my duffle bag, watching television, studying occasionally and enjoying free food. I found one of Fasiq’s hoodies smuggled among my clothes. The front said “Wesley Willis” and the back featured Wesley’s giant laughing face and the words, “Good News is Rock n’ Roll.” I did not know who Wesley Willis was.

“He’s the Qutb,” replied Fasiq when I asked.

“Besides that,” said Jehangir, “he’s a rock star from Chicago. Put out over sixty albums and wrote two thousand songs.”

“Wesley’s awesome,” said Rabeya.

“He whups the camel’s ass with a belt!” boomed Fasiq in what I imagined was an imitation of him.

“He can really rock it out,” said Jehangir in the same voice. “He is a rock star in God’s joy world.”

“He can rock it to Russia,” Fasiq added.

I wore the Wesley hoodie to what would become, after upcoming construction, the largest mall in North America. It was in the history section at Borders Books that I received my first comment.

“Yo,” said a girl behind me. “That hoodie is HOT.” I turned around. She was a short South Asian with shoulder-length black hair. Her jacket and the strap of her big purse were decorated with band buttons. I could not tell how old she was, but knew she was younger than me.

“You like Wesley Willis?” I asked.

“I LOVE Wesley Willis!” I noticed that when people say they
love
Wesley Willis, they intonate it like he’s an actual guy down the street. “Rock n’ Roll McDonalds, Chicken Cow, he’s the Shit.”

“Yeah he is.”

“Your mullet is the reason people hate you,” she bellowed in the same voice Jehangir and Fasiq did. “Take your ass to the barbershop. Tell the barber that you’re sick of looking like an ASSHOLE!” I laughed to feign knowledge of what any of that had meant. One of her buttons said
sXe.

“You’re straightedge?” I asked, proud that at least I was cool enough to get
that.

“Yep-pers.”

“Me too.”

“Yayyy!” I could not tell if she were being sarcastic or just cute.

“My name’s Yusef, by the way.”

“I’m Fareeha.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

“So... have you always been straightedge?”

“I had a cigarette in seventh grade, but other than that yeah.”

“I had a cigar in spring 1998,” I replied. “But that’s it.” I read her buttons. The Lindsey Diaries. After School Knife Fight. Black Paper Diary. Poison the Well. A Life Once Lost. Beloved. Between the Buried and Me. A mess more bands and one reading NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR YOUR ART.

“Nice. Well, I guess I’ll catch you later.” She then walked away. I spent the rest of the day wondering if I should have asked for her number.

 

 

The next day I shaved my testicles. I don’t know why. I also shaved around the base of my penis, which Jehangir had once told me would make it seem larger. Umar had often said it was
fard
to remove your pubic hair.

My bald scrotum had the texture of those red stress-relief things you’d buy at Spencer’s Gifts. You know, where it has protuberances almost resembling a face and you can squeeze or pull on it and it slowly returns to the original shape. I think it was due to my balls retracting from the cold of shaving cream and water. Usually they just drooped.

 

 

Al-hamdulilah, the 1-90 was okay for my drive back. When I returned to the punk house I found a mid-20’s Arab on our porch.
He stood tall and confident in a spiked leather jacket like Jehangir’s but green, blue jeans, Doc Martens, white cotton kufi. His white t-shirt bore the cover design for Rancid’s
... And
Out Come the Wolves album with the spray-painted red stencil lettering and the mohawk-punk with tattooed arms sitting on the steps with his face buried in his lap.

Most interesting about the man: his beard was half off. On one side it went full mufti-length. On the other he had completely shaved it.

“As-salaamu alaikum,” I said going up the steps.

“Wa alaikum as-salaam, brother. I’m Harun.”

“I’m Yusef.”

“Yes, mash’Allah.”

“You met Harun?” asked Jehangir as the screen door swung open.

“Just now,” I replied.

“You know who this guy is? He’s a fuckin’ cult hero in California. Legendary zine writer, right? He travels the country hoppin’ trains and hitchhiking or bummin’ rides off friends and lives off dumpsters, sleeps in masjids, stays in youth hostels, befriends hoboes, rides with truckers and Tablighs and his whole life is just a big sociological experiment.”

“Wow,” I said.

“This guy and his fuckin’ zines are nuts. His shit’s going to be the canon for taqwacore ten years from now, it’ll be like the fuckin’ Muwatta or some shit.”

“Staghfir’Allah,” said Harun.

“Harun,” said Jehangir, “tell him why you shave half the beard.”

“Oh, right,” said Harun. “You see, during the time of the Crusades, when Muslim soldiers were captured, the Christians would shave off half their beards and then send them back to their home-lands
like that. It was intended as a complete disgrace. These troops would have to return to their wives and families looking like emasculated half-men.”

“Damn,” I said.

“So the reason I shave half my beard,” he continued, “is to highlight the current condition of our umma today. For a variety of reasons, some from external forces and some killing us from within, the Muslims are stripped of their power and respect.”

“Harun’s crashing on Ayyub’s old couch until the show,” Jehangir explained. “Then he’s putting it all down in his zine. This shit’s gonna be immortal, bro.”

 

 

Harun and Jehangir got drunk that night and regaled us all with stories of their separate travels and shared experiences in California.

“Remember Bloody?” Harun asked.

“Hell yeah!” Jehangir yelled with eyes half open. “Bloody’s still around, from what I hear.”

“Where did you guys ever find him?”

“He’d been around awhile.”

“Crazy shit, that guy,” said Harun. “But one thing I’ll give ‘im: he’s fuckin’ fearless, fuckin’ crazier than a shithouse rat. I’ve seen Bloody do things at shows—shit, not even shows; he’ll pull the same shit in a diner or fuckin’ kindergarten for all he cares but man, you wouldn’t believe.”

“We’ve seen him test Allah’s patience many a time,” said Jehangir.

“But you know, a guy like Bloody is proof that Islam has lost its creative drive.”

“What do you mean?” asked Rabeya.

“Because they can’t handle someone who startles and scares. If
Bloody were to step into a regular old masjid,” Harun replied, “you know it’d just be a matter of time before somebody said to him, ‘you know brother, it’s not sunna for you to carry a bad name like Bloody, you should pick a nice name like... oh, Muhammad.’ And they’d take his jacket, you know they’d take his jacket. And do something with his hair. And give him leather socks. But shit, Bloody’d just punch ‘em all in the brains, every last one of ’em.”

 

 

“So there’s going to be how many bands staying here?” Umar asked Jehangir.

“I don’t quite know yet. A shitload, I think.”

“Where are they all going to sleep?”

“In the living room, in the dining room. In the halls. Under the kitchen table.”

“Some of these taqwacores are girls?”

“Yeah.”

“And you have liwaticore bands coming?”

“A couple, yeah.”

“And they’re all sleeping out here together? Guys, girls and liwats?”

“Yep.”

“You see, brother,” said Jehangir with a hand on Umar’s shoulder, “I was worried about the men and women together, and that’s why I invited the liwats. The liwats are going to corrupt all the men and turn
them
liwat, and the women will be safe, insha’Allah.” Sarcasm had become the only way anyone could deal with Umar.
The next week all four members of One Trip Abroad showed up in their sticker-covered van. Jehangir ran out, flew over the porch steps and hugged them like old friends. He threw his arm around a spike-haired Syrian who I later learned was the lead singer, Dee Dee Ali. He sported a navy blue pea coat over baggy pants with Union Jacks all over them. Red suspenders hung at his hips. Safety-pin in his nose like two-dimensional stereotype Hollywood punks. Behind him three likewise, one carrying a big bulky guitar case.

Dee Dee Ali’s knee-high leather boots curled at the toe like a genie.

“You got the Iron Sheik boots!” shrieked Jehangir. “Holeeee shit! That’s hot, brother, wow—”

“Got them from the guy who makes ’em for wrestlers,” replied Dee Dee Ali.

“Amazing,” said Jehangir. “We used to talk about that shit
all
the time.” I could observe from the giddy schoolboy smile that Dee Dee Ali was for Jehangir what Jehangir provided me: the mantled big-brother invincible with Persian fire-halo and football-star heroics. He was also, from what I gathered, how Jehangir Tabari might have liked to view himself.

“Look at this nonsense,” said Dee Dee Ali with a gesture to the white streets. “What the shit is with this?”

“Welcome to Buffalo,” replied Jehangir.

“We’re the coldest Muslims on the fuckin’ planet.”

Inside Dee Dee Ali saw Harun and Harun saw Dee Dee Ali and they raced to each other like long-lost brothers. Between the three Khalifornians something special had just happened that made me at once warm and jealous to see it. Dee Dee Ali and the rest of his band sat in the living room, the guy with the guitar case opening it up to unveil the acoustic. As he strummed and Jehangir stood beaming, Dee Dee Ali belted out a taqwacore anthem.
I see
Muhammad down at the corner storelrockin’ on Galaga, getting the high score/when he delivers sermons the kids think he’s a borelbut when he smashes idols, everyone cheers for more—

 

 

Sitting on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store on Grant, the one with the white horse—Ayyub, me and One Trip Abroad’s bass player, a feral head of curly black hair with wildman’s beard speckled by tufts of gray. Six foot eight, three hundred pounds but wiry and agile like he could just up and dropkick your face off with big furry boots. Beyond our little sheltered patch of dry pavement everything was covered in snow or wet with melting snow and slush. I looked across the street at a pair of dirty, poverty-costumed, late-middle-aged Hispanic men standing in discussion by the bank and then heard a physically uncomfortable sound that just got louder and louder as though some horrible machine was on its way—like shaking rocks in a tin can in front of eleven microphones—and I honestly got scared as it came near. Then past the bank and old Puerto Ricans rode a black boy on a bike with no tires.

The three of us watched him ride on tirelessly down Grant, his ass hovering above the seat.

“Buffalo’s dying,” said Ayyub. “Time to get outta here.” However, he was soon distracted. “Look at that dog over there. That’s a big dog. You’d have to shoot a gun eight or nine times to kill that dog.”

“Alcohol,” said the bass player without provocation, “is the curse on American sex.”

“What?” I asked. Something about him—maybe the holy beard—made him look like his opinion actually weighed something.
“America’s so fucked about sex,” the bassist explained, “that the guys need alcohol for confidence and girls need alcohol to drop all their ingrained hang-ups. So by the time people get to banging, their brains are so dulled by beer that there’s no personality or spirit to anything they do and they’re just like two humping animals.”

“Wow,” I said.

“In Europe they’re much healthier about everything,” said the bassist. “Sex, drugs, drink—Europeans are cool, they’re just chill about it. Americans can’t get over this whole rebelling-against-the-parents complex. It’s pretty childish.” I saw a trace of Jehangir-ness in his urge for spontaneous philosophizing and wondered if all taqwacores carried the same mournful rugged romanticism.

“What’s that shit on your forehead?” asked Ayyub, causing me to study the bassist myself. Above his eyes crinkled a virtual road map of ancient scars.

“Qumma-zani,” he replied.

 

 

I felt self-conscious about masturbating with our new guests in the house but went ahead and shook my pipick knowing it’d only get worse once all the other bands showed up. I got over the post-ejaculatory guilt and would come downstairs relaxed and somehow more confident. Perhaps it was that any sexually interesting females I might encounter had temporarily lost their hold on me.

 

 

The vans came streaming down the interstates, knowing whatever big cities they rumbled through only by the big flat green signs reading in the same font everywhere. It all looked the same. Road and more road. Rest stop parking lots for sleep. When one van
broke down its cargo and passengers were distributed evenly among the rest. They came strong and steady like a caravan, like Bedouins across the Hejaz.

They wore kifayas and knit ski caps, turbans and Aqua Net mohawks. They were dirty and rugged, their bodies wearing the grime of roads: sweat, oil, stale salty odors; their insides wrecked with Mobile station cuisine: vinegar sausage sticks, potato chips, thirty-five cent cinnamon buns, Pepsi; their brains worn down by bad sleep and lack of stimulation from the Eisenhower System landscapes; their bodies growing hard and mean as they went from a warm place to a cold place.

The vans lined up along our street. It was Thursday, December nineteenth.